Here’s a straightforward question: Is Google good for history? Or, more specifically, is Google Books good for historians?
That was the topic of a lively afternoon session at the American Historical Association’s annual conference, happening right now in San Diego. The answer, as you might expect, wasn’t equally straightforward. In fact, for nearly two hours historians alternately praised Google for its stunningly ambitious project to digitize the world’s books and berated the company for missteps and a (supposed) lack of scholarly sophistication.
Kicking off the proceedings was Daniel J. Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Cohen said “of course” Google is good for history, but he went on to criticize the project for its lack of openness: “I cannot understand why Google doesn’t make it easier for historians such as myself, who want to do technical analyses of historical books, to download them en masse more easily.” You can read Cohen’s entire talk on his blog.
Paul Duguid was harsher. While Cohen prefaced his remarks by saying it was easy to heap scorn on Google, Duguid, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, thought critics generally pulled their punches. Duguid certainly didn’t. He said Google was “naive” going into the project and is guilty of “lying” about its search totals. He also mocked mistakes Google Books has made, particularly when it comes to metadata, that is, the information that identifies and categorizes a book or other material. Apparently, Henry James did not write Madame Bovary. It was some guy named Flaubert. Who knew?
The product manager for Google Books, Brandon Badger, gamely absorbed the blows, but didn’t really engage the criticism head-on. Badger’s message seemed to be, look, we’re getting better all the time and we have the very best of motives. He acknowledged that Google Books is imperfect and that they’re looking for ways to make searching books easier and the results more accurate. Still, the criticism kept coming and, by the end, the Google executive seemed to be searching for the exit.
Controversy over Google Books is, of course, not new. Read Jennifer Howard’s previous coverage of the lawsuit against Google by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers here and here. Read more about the proposed settlement here.
(You can read the blow-by-blow of the session, and other updates from the conference, on Twitter.).
4 Responses to Historians Throw the Book(s) at Google
wmartin46 - January 8, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Every comment about “what’s wrong with Google Books” is absolutely correct. The problem is that no other organization, like the world’s greatest Universities, or the Library of Congress, seemed to be interested in taking on this project. So, Google is to be commended for its efforts, not ridiculed.Why doesn’t someone at this convention try to put together a “wish list” of ideas and get them off to the Brendon Badger guy, and see what his response is.And while you’re at it .. maybe each of the Universities would pitch into the hat and perhaps help to defray the scanning expenses, OCR expenses, storage and bandwidth that Google is shouldering, for the most part.Google is not building the “library of the future”. Perhaps they should take that one too. But all of the Universities in the US (and the World) have all sorts of talent that likes to write papers .. so why not take on this task rather than carp at Google.
bibliothecarius - January 11, 2010 at 10:57 am
Critism of the Google Books project is not carping, wmartin46. The world’s greatest Universities and the Library of Congress are indeed digitizing their collections. Most of the large libraries in these institutions do have active digital library programs. All of these expensive efforts are done to help preserve and make accessable books and other resources for scholars worldside and are being conducted in a manner by and large that avoids the quick and dirty methods of the Google Books program.In the public sphere, other institutions like the Internet Archive and the Hathi Trush are preserving items for future use. So wmartin46, you are either not well informed about digital libraries or you are trying to create a straw man. Or perhaps you might even be a Google employee.
dpn33 - January 12, 2010 at 10:37 am
So you have a choice: “quick and dirty,” as bibliothecarius labels it, with large volumes of content rapidly becoming available through Google, albeit with numerous errors and issues; or extremely slow and steady the way libraries are doing it (the only way libraries can afford to do it), with fewer mistakes and problems but literally decades of work needed to accomplish the volume that Google is doing. Tough choice.
larryc - January 12, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Google has spent a guesstimates $300 million digitizing books. A large investment but one that the universities and government could match if this were a priority.